


how to rescue your idiot vampire crush from the jaws of death (and maybe kiss him too)

by elliptical



Series: the most self-indulgent vampire AU of all time [5]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Loves Ronan Lynch, Adam Parrish's Anxiety, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bathing/Washing, Canon Typical Mental Health Issues, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drama, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Poisoning, Release of Tension, Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish, Second Chapter Contains:, Sickfic, Vampire Adam Parrish, Vampire Bites, Vampire Hunter Lynch Family, Vampire Illness, a combination of my two absolute favorite angst tropes, one: dying character calls a loved one on the phone pretending to be fine, two: character breaks down over loved one's dead body only for them to gasp back to life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-13 09:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: Silence, agonizing in its completeness.  Then, “I think I’m being hunted.”Ronan swore.  He was already in motion, pounding up the stairs to sort through Declan’s store of weapons.  “Don’t take cover anywhere you can be cornered.  Move if you think they’re close.  Turn on the ‘Find My Friend’ app, I’ll track your phone.”“It’s not that, really.”  Adam’s voice was faux-even, which made the quake at the end more obvious.  Suddenly, Ronan realized what was off about the tone: terror, all-encompassing and uncontrollable.  “I think I’m dying.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> in a very long verse full of self-indulgent fic this is. by far the most self indulgent. like this is so self indulgent that posting it feels indecent  
anyway this is for everyone who's been desperate for ronan and adam to finally stop beating around the bush. hopefully y'all like it with as much melodrama as me
> 
> (you can read this piece without reading the rest of the series and still follow it)

When Adam called Ronan at half past midnight on a nondescript Tuesday evening, Ronan picked up immediately.

Ronan Lynch’s distaste for his phone was legendary. He disliked having to modulate his voice, and he disliked that his body language couldn’t compensate for the times that he accidentally failed to modulate his voice. Talking on the phone meant that he was simultaneously unsuccessful at communicating what he wanted to and _very_ successful at broadcasting _more_ than he wanted to.

But he picked up when Adam called.

It wasn’t a decision born of favoritism; Ronan was just as fond of Gansey and Blue as he was of Adam, though his feelings toward all three parties took very different shapes. The decision also wasn’t born of proximity, or lack thereof; the three of his People lived in the same town, and he’d seen Adam barely half a week ago besides.

It was that Adam did not call him.

Adam had a smartphone, because most people needed a smartphone to get by these days regardless of their income bracket. He did not, however, use it to call Ronan. To send texts, maybe, which he knew Ronan would read even if he didn’t respond. But not to call. Adam preferred not to waste time with things he termed “pointless endeavors.” If Ronan wouldn’t pick up his phone, Adam didn’t see the point in pretending the impossible would become possible.

Gansey would occasionally call for the sake of leaving voicemails, with the understanding that Ronan would occasionally pick up and let him have a one-sided conversation if Ronan was in a particularly benevolent (or lonely) mood. Blue would occasionally call to see if he’d “grown up and decided to stop being an asshole,” and her voicemails were always a cheerful, two-second, “Not yet!”

Ronan didn’t feel the need to answer their calls, because the chances that their calls were emergencies were slim to none.

Adam, on the other hand --

Even as he was staring at the caller ID telling himself it was a pocket dial, a buzzing of nerves hummed in his chest.

Ronan picked up the phone and grunted into the receiver.

“Ronan?” Immediately, there was something off about Adam’s voice, which was ridiculous given that he’d only uttered two syllables. The way he’d greeted with ‘Ronan’ instead of ‘Lynch?’ No, that made sense if he was making sure Declan hadn’t snagged the phone.

“Acknowledge that you’re awake, you asshole,” Adam said.

“I’m awake.” Ronan usually was around this time of night. His schedule tended toward the nocturnal, which was a side effect of both hanging around vampires and being a menace. “What’s up?”

“Oh, you know. Whatever. What are you up to?”

Definitely something weird.

“Watching reruns of World’s Dumbest Criminals,” Ronan said cautiously. “What about you?”

“Who’s the dumbest criminal on your current episode?”

Jesus. Ronan rubbed his free hand over his cheek. If there was one thing in the world of which he was _absolutely_ certain, it was that Adam did not give a single fuck about reruns of World’s Dumbest Criminals.

“You don’t call me to shoot the shit. Gansey does. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Silence, agonizing in its completeness. Then, “I think I’m being hunted.”

Ronan swore. He was already in motion, pounding up the stairs to sort through Declan’s store of weapons. “Don’t take cover anywhere you can be cornered. Move if you think they’re close. Turn on the ‘Find My Friend’ app, I’ll track your phone.”

“It’s not that, really.” Adam’s voice was faux-even, which made the quake at the end more obvious. Suddenly, Ronan realized what was off about the tone: terror, all-encompassing and uncontrollable. “I think I’m dying.”

In all the time Ronan had known him, Adam had never been prone to melodrama or hypochondria. If anything, he was more likely to downplay danger and pain. He was a peculiar creature in more ways than one. Of all the vampires Ronan had met, Adam was one of the strangest. In the past, he’d managed to starve himself to a breaking point without Ronan noticing. And he didn’t like to show fear, even if he was among the most fearful people Ronan knew. It wasn’t so much active bravery as a survival mechanism. To Adam, as long as there was something that could be done about a situation, indulging fear was pointless. If there wasn’t something that could be done, indulging fear was also pointless.

If Adam thought he was dying, he probably _was_ dying.

“Turn on the app,” Ronan urged him, “and then tell me what happened.”

He waited for the buzz of the shared notification, thumbing open the app without breaking the connection. Ronan knew the place, or at least the area -- a suburban landscape on the edge of the tiny downtown, near a twenty-four hour cafe that served undead-looking humans and just the plain undead. He put the phone back to his ear and turned toward the door, strapping two holsters and their silver-loaded guns to his belt. In an ideal world, he wouldn’t have to use them; the thought made him queasy. But it would be stupid not to arm himself.

“I think I might be bait,” Adam said. He sounded more wrong with every passing second, his words too slow, like his brain was taking longer than usual to measure the weight or wrap his tongue around the syllables. All these _I think_ statements, like he couldn’t trust his reality enough to present objective facts. “If I get you killed...”

“Non-starter,” Ronan snapped.

A shadow grew in the hallway outside the open door, making him jump. But it was only Declan. Ronan’s brother had his own phone to his ear, muttering a tense back-and-forth. Whatever he was saying, Ronan couldn’t hear it above the pounding drum of his own heart.

There was an instant -- just an instant -- where he wondered if this was Declan’s doing. Clearly Declan was not the literal one stalking or hunting or _whatever_ing Adam, given that he was standing in front of Ronan, but maybe he’d wrangled some hunter allies to -

Ronan stopped the thought in its tracks. He might believe the worst of Declan at all times, but nothing about this would make sense, even if his brother was a semi-reformed vampire hunter who’d spent the last year basically bathing in the blood of his enemies. From Declan’s narrowed eyes, Ronan figured his brother knew exactly what he’d just been worrying.

Whatever. If Declan wanted Ronan to trust him, he had to make more of an effort to be trustworthy.

Declan ended his call and dropped his phone into his pocket. “Maura,” he said by way of explanation. Of course he’d called her. He’d probably started dialing the second he heard Ronan’s tone change. “She said bring him here, not to Fox Way. Safer.”

Maura Sargent happened to be one of the most influential vampires in the state of Virginia. Her daughter happened to be Ronan’s best friend. This fortunate combination had forced Declan, with much gritting of teeth and swearing under his breath, into a reluctant allyship with the women of Fox Way. Maura and Declan did not like each other, as far as Ronan could tell, but they preferred not to work at cross-purposes.

The Fox Way coven was powerful enough to have a known nest location that had never been disturbed. Even Ronan’s father, who had been indiscriminate in his judgment of which vampires needed exterminating, had upheld an agreement to leave them alone. When he thought too deeply about it, the existence of that truce unsettled Ronan. Niall Lynch wasn’t known for his calculated and rational decision-making, and he certainly wasn’t known for keeping promises. The Fox Way women weren’t known for tolerating vampire hunters. Ronan wasn’t sure which party had been more afraid of the other, for both to manage coexistence in the same little town.

Because the Fox Way household had never been touched by hunters, Maura’s decree surprised Ronan. He supposed Declan may have been lying about the other person on the phone, but that was a line of paranoia he didn’t have time or energy to follow. Adam should have been safe with Maura’s family. Granted, the Barns was also protected against unwanted intrusions, and there had yet to be known trespassers besides those Ronan had invited in. Maybe Maura just didn’t want an unknown hunter or supernatural entity enticed into her kingdom’s radius.

As if following his train of thought, Declan added, “She said she’ll keep Blue inside.”

“Declan just talked to Maura. She’s gonna keep Blue safe,” Ronan told the phone. Whether Declan had intended him to relay this information or just meant it as a reassurance was questionable. Ronan was still unused to Declan making an _effort,_ and he didn’t need to be distracted right now.

“Cool.” There was a small crackle of static on the other end, which resolved into rasping breath. “I shouldn’t have called. I’m an idiot. If they’re trying to draw you out, of course they expected me--” A pause for more labored panting. “I panicked. God, I hate panicking. I’m fine. Don’t come get me.”

“I’m coming to get you.”

“Yeah.” Adam sounded resigned, now. In an ideal world, this tone would mean he was snug in his St. Agnes apartment, sitting on the bathroom floor with his forehead pressed to his knees, exasperation radiating from every pore in his body. “You’re gonna be really Ronan about this, and nothing I say is gonna stop that, and it’s all gonna be hilariously sad and predictable. God. I’m the only asshole alive with an ounce of sense, and I’ve fucked it to hell. The one time it counts, too. Typical.”

This small monologue lasted long enough for Ronan to complete a silent conversation with Declan. As Declan moved to his closet and rifled through it, Ronan’s abortive hand gesture said _what the hell are you doing._ Declan’s combination of raised eyebrow and raised protective-undertank-on-coathanger said _gearing up._ Ronan’s furious glare said _fuck off._ Declan’s placid changing into hunting gear said _I’m either going with you, or I’m going to choke you out and leave you locked in the basement while I handle this myself, so you pick your poison._

“You should curse more often,” Ronan told Adam. “Why do you think you’re dying?”

“I’m not. I’m fine. I’m sleep deprived. Paranoia hallucinating. Wild stuff. I...” An uneven little hitch of breath. “I’m -- fine.”

“You’re scaring the shit out of me is what you’re doing.” Ronan watched Declan continue layering on a frankly improbable amount of armor. “Tell me what the fuck is going on. I’m not playing around.”

Ronan’s grip on the phone tightened at the initial lack of response. “Hold -- hold on --” Adam said, and then there was a muffled scraping sound, a clatter, and an unholy screeching noise that Ronan dearly hoped was metal rather than something sentient. “Okay, I’m back. God. Okay. I bought a coffee like an idiot, and then didn’t watch it being mixed like a bigger idiot, and now my body’s trying to convince me I’ve been poisoned. Paranoia. Placebo effect.”

“And the being hunted?”

“There’s two people following me. Human. They keep splitting up to try to herd me from opposite directions. I’m having to get creatively evasive, but I--” Pause. “I think they know what I am.”

“Maybe they just want your autograph,” Ronan suggested. This was sarcastic, but he followed up with seriousness. “Find a path between them and run. You can lose them in like, ten seconds. As for the coffee, let’s consider it unrelated for now so we don’t lose our goddamn shit.” The ‘we’ of this sentiment was mostly Ronan himself, who was fighting to sound rational so he could convince his mind to stop flashing Worst Case Scenario warning signs across the backs of his eyelids. “Like an allergic reaction. There’s tons of shit you react to. What’s on a coffee menu that vampires don’t like?”

“Coffee,” Adam said wryly. “Uh, I dunno. I guess anything could mess with my system. The nutients don’t get absorbed the same way, or like, at all, I don’t think. Gansey’s studied it. Uh -- hhhah, ah, hang -- hang on.” Ronan tensed. “I’m -- I’m fine, yeah. Paranoia. I’m going home now. Don’t come out here.”

“Okay, cool.” Ronan pulled the phone away from his ear and tapped a couple buttons, then returned to the conversation. “Quick question, though.”

“Sure.”

“Why isn’t your dot moving on the Find My Phone GPS?”

The wheezing cadence of Adam’s breath was starting to worm little hooks of terror into Ronan’s mind. More little hooks, anyway, given that several already existed beforehand. It wasn’t the kind of panting that would be expected of a vampire running at a full-speed dead sprint, or even a full-speed dead marathon. Also, assuming the app wasn’t glitching and that GPS tracking was just as creepy and invasive as promised, there was no way Adam was running. His dot was stubbornly anchored to one of the apartment buildings a few neighborhoods away from the cafe.

“Masking software,” Adam finally offered, in a tone that said he didn’t have the energy to sell the lie but felt obligated to tell one regardless. “To ping a false location. Throw off third party data crawlers.”

“I’m going to kick your ass, Parrish, if you don’t cut the bullshit in the next two seconds.”

“You won’t get here fast enough.” Of everything that had been said so far, this was eerily calm. Like Adam had accepted the fear and moved into a place beyond it. This was something Adam was capable of doing, Ronan knew, but only when he was certain he had no choice but to endure the frightening thing. Ronan felt the drip of ice down his spine. “I realized about five minutes ago. It won’t matter. You’ll just put yourself in danger. Tell Gansey and Blue -- no, God, never mind, the dramatic last words thing is so embarrassing. They already know everything important.”

Ronan allowed himself two seconds to fantasize that Adam had ascended to new levels of dickdom shit tier by pulling the worst prank of all time. He knew better, though. “Tell me the symptoms.”

“I’m, uh.” Adam laughed, just a breath, humorless. “Not feeling awesome.”

“Specifics. I can’t supernatural Web MD shit with ‘not feeling awesome.’”

“My mouth and throat are burning. Chest, too. Uh, my balance is off. Gait abnormalities. Breathing’s hard. More neurological symptoms, maybe. Vision’s gone to shit. Can’t hear out of my left ear, uh, can’t tell if it’s partial or total deafness. It’s just, uh, the --” His words were tripping again, slower and full of more interruptions than his usual speech. “The damage seems more complete when I don’t have, uh, supernatural bullshit compensating.”

Ronan’s knees liquefied. The slow horror of it was impossible to articulate. Instead of a concrete feeling, it was just this: Ronan sinking onto the floor of Declan’s bedroom, gripping the back of his head with his free hand, screwing his eyes shut. Swallowing hard, then swallowing again when the first action didn’t dispel the choking clog in his throat. He understood, now, why Adam had sounded so afraid, and why he’d switched to an “I’m fine, don’t worry” tactic so fast.

Ronan wasn’t sure whether Adam was beating around the bush because he was sparing himself or because he was sparing Ronan. It was possible that Adam harbored hope that Ronan’s vampire hunting education had skimped on the details of one of the deadliest, most effective poisons in an average arsenal.

“Let me guess,” Ronan said. There was an edge to his voice, but it sounded like coldness, not fear. Thank fuck. The last thing Adam needed was to know Ronan was dissolving into a panicked puddle while Declan eyed him like an inconvenient pest he wasn’t allowed to swat. “You wouldn’t win the gold in the Olympic hundred meter dash right now.”

Adam’s own response was equally cold, clinical. “I was managing sprints of average human speed when it was just hitting me. And then walking sprints of average human speed. I called when I realized I was slowing down.” And then his voice broke, and that was the worst yet, because the fear and pain were still there, weren’t something he was successfully setting aside. Ronan could feel his brain slotting the sound into core memory, a moment to replay as a years-long nightmare soundtrack, even as he tried to cast it out of his mind. “But it’s -- I’m not -- it’s hitting me too fast. The dose.”

Ronan needed to get up and go, now. Time had never been more important. He dug his fingers into his scalp. There was a warm hand against his arm -- Declan had crossed to him, crouched down. Ronan shook his head.

He had to say it, because leaving the word unspoken was becoming worse than acknowledging it. “They put silver in your drink.”

“Yeah. Probably.” Adam exhaled. “I’m getting tired. If you have less dire theories, I’m open to them.”

Ronan did not have any less dire theories. Though Declan had only heard one half of the conversation, his stony expression didn’t seem to bode well for alternative explanations, either.

“Okay, well. I’m coming to get you.” Ronan found his strength, or possibly just leaned against Declan to get back to his feet. It was hard to tell. “Silver’s not an automatic fatality, even ingested. It can be, but it mainly just makes you fuckers really easy to kill. You’re not dying.”

The first sentence: a truth. Second: a half-lie. Third: complete falsehood.

“All right.”

“Tell me what you’re doing.”

“Lying on a roof. Climbed up the fire escape. Hoping they think they lost me. Looking at the moon. Counting how many times this satellite blinks so I don’t close my eyes.”

“Good,” Ronan said. “Keep counting the blinks. You’re not that far away. I’m gonna be there in fifteen minutes. Twenty tops.”

Declan still had his hand braced against Ronan’s arm. The remoteness in his face would have been chilling, if Ronan wasn’t used to his brother being an emotionless piece of shit robot. “I can handle this,” Declan said. “You’re out of practice, and we don’t know these people or their endgame. You’ll be a liability.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan replied. “Declan’s being a dick,” he clarified, in response to Adam’s quizzical noise.

“Let me handle this, Ronan.”

Declan’s nose had yet to fully heal from the last time Ronan had broken it, but Ronan was sorely tempted to throw a fresh punch. That tended to be his first instinct whenever Declan tried to pull out the Authoritative Voice, particularly when it had _that_ undertone. Ronan put his hand over the microphone to keep Adam out of the family drama, then hissed, “You won’t try to help him.”

Declan didn’t flinch, which made Ronan want to punch him more. “Yes, I will.”

“Then why the fuck are you ‘Daddy’s going out for a pack of cigarettes’ing it?”

“You know why.”

Ronan hoped his coverage of the microphone was complete enough that Adam couldn’t hear a goddamn word. The message was loud and clear. _Because we’ll be picking up a body._

“No. No. Fuck you.” He wrested control back, squashed the horror into a place he couldn’t touch. If Declan was writing Adam off as a lost cause, Ronan had to believe in his survival twice as hard.

“Ronan.”

There was no chance of Ronan staying within the protection of the Barns. The gaze he leveled at Declan made this clear; it was all external calm, faultless save the wild terror in his eyes. Declan regarded him with the same calm, minus the terror, a mirror of Ronan’s face. It was an expression that said, _Fine, you little shit. Then there’s no chance I’m not coming with._

“Give me the phone,” Declan said.

Ronan’s look now said, _Are you fucking crazy?_

“I can isolate the logistical questions better than you can,” Declan said, imperious and impatient. He punctuated the statement by snapping his fingers, which was so obnoxious it distracted Ronan from the rotting blackness in his chest. “For fuck’s sake.”

“Adam?” Ronan spoke into the receiver, sent a silent prayer heavenward. “You still there?”

A pause. Then, too quiet - “Yeah.”

“I’m putting you on with Declan.”

He prayed further for a protest, for any sign of life or fire from the other end of the line. But all he got was an equally quiet, “Okay.”

Ronan handed the phone over. Declan cradled it between his shoulder and ear as he returned to sliding weapons into varying belts and holsters, kneeling on the floor to make the work more efficient. Putting it on speaker would have been a hell of a lot easier. The fact that he wasn’t meant that Declan didn’t want Ronan to hear whatever Adam was saying.

Declan’s tone was corporate and detached enough that he might have been lounging with his feet kicked up in some penthouse skyscraper office. Certainly he didn’t sound like he was pulling together gear for a life-in-peril mission. “Are you near a mirror--? All right. Cough -- What color is it?”

Whatever the answer to this question was, it made Declan mouth, _Bring blood_ at Ronan.

Ronan didn’t need to be told twice. The journey to the basement was a blur in his mind. He’d obtained a spacious bag from somewhere along the way, and he heaped sealed plastic bags of donated blood from the fridge downstairs into it. As many as he could fit without risking that one of them would burst and cause a whole new problem.

Gearing up was the easy part. Ronan still fit into the protective jacket, jeans, boots, and gloves he’d worn before his father had died. The outfit was pressed into the back of the kitchen storage closet, untouched for more than a year. There was no way he was bothering with armored padding when he’d already wasted so much time arguing with both Adam and Declan. He hollered up the stairs that he was leaving whether Declan was ready or not.

Declan’s feet pounded down the steps. He was ignoring Ronan in favor of listening intently to the phone, but he always looked like he was listening intently to people’s conversations, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It wasn’t until he was out the door and halfway down the driveway that he spoke again, terse. “Parrish. Focus.” And then, as he slid into the passenger seat of the BMW, as Ronan revved the engine and tore out of his parking space, “If you pass out, you’re a dead man.”

“Put it on speaker,” Ronan said. There was no room for argument. It was infinitely worse to know Adam was fading without being able to hear him.

Declan connected the phone to the car speakers, turned the volume up. A good choice, considering Adam’s voice had gotten weak enough that it was barely distinguishable from the ambient wind in the background. “I hear voices,” he murmured. “I think. The phone, and the deaf ear, hold on. Messing me up.” Slight scraping and scrabbling, magnified by the amplified speakers. “Mmm. Yep. They’re coming up here.”

He did not sound concerned, but possibly that was because he didn’t have enough energy for inflection. Ronan didn’t want to consider the alternative: that he’d simply given up.

“Okay,” he said. “Time for a new hiding place. Get the fuck up.”

“Mmm.”

“Adam, get the _fuck_ up, or those assholes are gonna be the least of your fucking worries the second I get there.”

It would have sounded more threatening if the fear hadn’t bled through. Maybe, though, Ronan’s fear was a better motivator than his anger. At any rate, Adam offered a low reply of, “Okay. ‘Mmoving. I --” A thud, and a slight grunt. “I can’t...”

“Which fire escape are they climbing?” Declan demanded. He’d picked up the phone and was studying the screen like it blazed the answers to a final he hadn’t studied for.

“Both.”

“If you’re looking at the mountains behind the fire escape,” Declan said, “on the wall to your left, there’s a pipe that runs the length of the building. You’re gonna slide down like a fireman’s pole, _not_ let go, and pray it holds your weight.”

“That’s a fucking terrible plan,” Ronan hissed. It was impressive, actually, how confidently Declan had delivered the instructions. Pipes did not good escape routes make, particularly when the escapee in question had poison slowly fucking with his motor control.

Declan waved him off. _“Move,_ Parrish. You’re dead if you don’t.”

The amplified banging and clanging in the background was louder now. Whoever was hunting Adam, they were getting awfully close. Ronan laid harder into the gas pedal, careening around a precarious corner at twice the speed limit.

More labored breathing. Scraping, shuffling. A sudden underwater-esque muffle, presumably due to Adam placing the phone in his pocket. Ronan’s knuckles were white around the steering wheel. The road in front of him had become a vibrating blur. He braced himself for a sudden, violent end to the connection.

The connection didn’t snap, which was how Ronan heard the whoosh of muffled air followed by a much less muffled thud. He pressed the knuckles of one hand to his forehead, other hand still jerking the steering wheel with more force than strictly necessary. Ordinarily, he’d have no doubts about Adam pirouetting off a three-story building. But an Adam with his supernatural abilities stripped was an Adam whose every bone could shatter like glass. Ronan hadn’t heard crunching, but wasn’t sure how loud crunching had to be before it was transmitted over the airwaves.

It was ten seconds -- Ronan counted them as they slipped by -- before Adam spoke. The longest ten seconds of his entire fucking life. “I’m out of their sight line. A little more awake. The fall helped.”

“Good,” Declan said, like he was walking Adam through a video game tutorial and had no stake in this beyond a few potential wasted minutes at the ‘Game Over’ screen. “Are you walking in the direction you just jumped?”

“I was. I’m sitting now.”

“No, you’re walking. Get up.”

Adam didn’t reply to this. Ronan strained to pick up noises in the background, anything that might have forced him to silence.

“Parrish,” Declan said. “Get up.”

“I,” Adam started, and faltered. “Don’t. Don’t think. You know.”

This was not nearly as eloquent or precise as Ronan was sure he wanted to be. Declan scoffed, anyway; the meaning was clear enough. “Oh, I know. Your body and brain are shutting down. Your energy is being redirected into purging the toxin. You can’t walk or see straight. Get up. You can force your body to do impossible shit when you have to, and you have to right now, and if you can’t, you’re going to die as soon as they climb down from the roof.”

Ronan wheeled around another corner at breakneck speed, swerved wildly to avoid a deer in the road, nearly wrecked the car, careened back on track. Declan reached up and gripped the ceiling handle to brace himself, shooting Ronan an irritable glare.

“Okay,” Adam said. “I’m up.”

Ronan didn’t know many specifics about Adam’s past, but he knew enough to be certain that Adam had been doing impossible shit for his entire life. He was familiar with the demands of survival. Ronan would have spared a moment for admiration if his head and heart weren’t crammed so full of everything else.

“Three buildings ahead, take a right. Walk through the alley, across the street, past the next building. You’re going to see a burned-out apartment on the left. The basement is concrete, so they won’t be able to smoke you out. Around the back side -- from where you are, it’s technically the front -- there’s a broken basement window. I’m looking at it on Street View. Assuming the pane hasn’t been repaired, because why would it be, climb inside and wait us out. We’re coming.”

“Okay.” Adam stopped speaking, but the phone played a soundtrack of erratic footsteps and gasping and more than a few stumbles. Ronan hated the picture it painted in his mind -- Adam, lurching and dizzy, moving molasses-slow through abandoned ghostlit streets, praying not to be spotted. An injured gazelle in a wildlife documentary about cheetahs. A foregone conclusion.

Finally, a tinkling of glass, another thud and muffled ‘oof.’ “Okay,” Adam said, or maybe Ronan just imagined his breath was shaping words. “I’m gonna hide.”

Ronan was forced to slow down as they entered the part of town with actual stoplights. It meant that they were on the edge of the suburban nightmare Adam was currently stranded in, but it also meant Ronan had to use the brakes if he wanted to avoid a wreck. At the very least, there were few active cars this time of night, so Ronan could consider the traffic lights to be friendly suggestions.

“We’re five minutes out,” Declan said. “Stay with me, Parrish.”

And Ronan hoped, wildly, that they were gonna make it, and they’d get Adam enough blood to flush out the toxins, and he’d bring Adam back to the Barns, and Adam would recover from the damage, and the whole experience would become the kind of story retold like an adventure instead of the worst terror of either of their lives.

Ronan was allowed to hope this for thirty-two whole seconds.

On the thirty-third second, a sound like a whimper crackled across the speakers. Ronan thought, at first, that there must have been a hurt puppy or kitten or _something_ in the basement, because the pitch did not sound like Adam at all, and Ronan did not want to consider what kind of pain could cause Adam to make that sound to begin with.

He was about to speak when there was another sound, this one much more human, just as un-Adam. It was the desolate half-sob of a child trying not to cry because they knew no one was coming.

“Adam,” Ronan said, “we’re almost there. I swear to God we’re almost there. Eight blocks, maybe. If downtown was gridded like any normal fucking place and had blocks.”

“I can’t see,” Adam whispered. Ronan had barely curled his lips into his next syllable when Adam added, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

And then there was a clatter.

And then the ambient hum of filtered radio static, the kind that played when the speakers weren’t being used for anything else.

Ronan swerved into the other lane to avoid colliding with a pickup truck as he ignored more clear intersection markings. The angry horn followed them for a good five seconds. He didn’t even hear it; he was busy looking at Declan, silently begging for an explanation besides “call ended.”

Declan shook his head.

“Get him back,” Ronan snarled. Then, again, _“Get him the fuck back,”_ and then he reached over and snatched the phone out of Declan’s hand, but the sentiment was pointless anyway, because they were pulling up in front of the building. The itch under Ronan’s skin was a live animal. God, he hoped the hunters made an appearance. He was not, at his core, a cold-blooded killer.

But he thought he could be, tonight.

Ronan skidded the BMW into a parking space, throwing open his door and diving out nearly before the vehicle had stopped moving. It didn’t matter if this was a run-of-the-mill vampire trap, or if Adam was too injured to move, or if he was entering the center of a conspiracy to murder the Lynch brothers. He did not care.

It was a testament to Declan’s alertness and fitness that he managed to catch up to Ronan. “I’ll watch and listen,” he said. There was an understanding, here, that Ronan was going to be the one to get Adam, and Declan was going to have to keep him from getting killed, because Ronan didn’t possess the capacity to protect himself right now. That was how it usually went with them, anyway, on the rare occasions they managed to be functional siblings.

Ronan acknowledged this with a grunt and crouched down. He gripped the upper edge of the window, hoisted his legs over the gaping lip, and slid neatly inside.

It was, indeed, the foundation for a burned-out shell of a building. Which meant it smelled like shit, and the fumes were probably gonna start growing in Ronan’s lungs, and the structure above was sagging and desperate to collapse into crushing rubble. But the actual basement had escaped the flames mostly unscathed thanks to the inflammable construction materials.

“Adam?” Ronan called, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

No answer.

There weren’t any structured rooms down here. Poles and support beams peppered the foundation, but Ronan’s voice echoed back at him. It wasn’t a large space -- there weren’t skyscrapers or giant McMansions in Henrietta -- but it yawned, and groaned, and felt an awful fucking lot like a tomb.

“Adam, I swear to fucking God.”

He wasn’t really expecting an answer this time, but the silence still deepened the dread.

The place was too empty to have any worthwhile hiding places. Except -- Ronan’s gaze zeroed in on a darker shadow against the already-existing shadows along the left wall. The wall itself was irregularly shaped, jutting out from below the staircase, like it hid a storage closet or --

Or a crawlspace.

The entrance was low, square, a dark mouth into hell. Ronan padded over to it, let his eyes adjust again. Not so dark, from here, really. Just a little alcove. A place Adam might have tucked himself to stay out of sight.

Ronan knelt down beside the crawlspace. It was precisely the kind of place Adam should not have hidden himself, at least in circumstances where he had the theoretical capability of fighting. The low ceiling was peppered with the sharp ends of rusted nails driven through planks above. Wooden shelves lined the walls, empty and cobwebbed and making further shadows of a shadowy space. The place was shaped like an L, a hidden architectural easter egg tucked under the stairs. At his full strength, Adam wouldn’t be able to lash out from under there. It would be painfully easy to cut him with weapons or set the shelves ablaze.

Adam was too smart to be so stupid, but he was also too weak to risk being seen at all. Stripped of supernatural capabilities, he had to strategize like a human. A small part of Ronan hoped that he’d ditched his phone inside and gone somewhere else, somehow, miraculously gathering the strength in the minute of dead air time. A larger part of Ronan thought there was a good chance that Adam was dead and Ronan was about to get _himself_ cornered.

It didn’t matter. There was no chance he wasn’t going inside.

He had to fold himself double to fit into the crawlspace, trying not to let his head smack against any of the ceiling nails -- God, the idea of ending this night with the mundanity of a tetanus shot was unbearable. Ronan gripped the ends of the shelves and pulled himself forward so that he could see into the darkened hollow beneath the stairs. His body was tensed for an attack, and then it was tenser.

_Oh, God, please, please, please._

A thousand nightmares, a million variations, infinite kaleidoscopic permutations of corpses.

_Oh, God, I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything._

“Adam,” Ronan said. It came out a low rasp, his mouth too dry to manage useful speech.

Adam didn’t stir.

He’d pulled himself as far underneath the stairs as he could get. Ronan flicked his phone flashlight on and shone it over the scene to dispel the clinging shadows. A mistake. The white light was too bright for this place. It turned the dusty alcove into a crime scene, an autopsy table, an illuminated lab. It washed out any of the desperate hope that Ronan was witnessing a trick of the dark.

Adam had wedged himself under the bottom three steps, curled in tight like a child hiding from the boogeyman. When he’d finally given up, he’d fallen forward instead of backward, a side effect of the defensive crouch he’d been in. One arm was outstretched along the floor, reaching toward the entrance -- toward Ronan -- like a final plea. His other arm had gotten pinned beneath his chest at an awkward angle not remotely conducive to natural sleep. His knees were still folded under him, spine hunched.

Ronan could see dirt-brown hair, light brown skin with the pallor of the dead underneath. As he shifted the angle of his own body, Adam’s face came into focus. His second set of teeth out, digging into his bottom lip hard enough to cut. He wouldn’t have been able to keep the vampire instincts inside as his body fought the poison’s grip. His mouth and chin were coated with blood, the red of poinsettias or tulips or a midlife crisis, a color that shouldn’t exist anywhere -- but particularly not here, not when Ronan’s soul was collapsing. Adam’s eyes were closed.

_I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything._

The moment had lasted maybe five seconds in its entirety. Ronan set his phone down with the flashlight shining upward like a dust-illuminating fountain on the concrete. Leaned forward and grabbed Adam’s outstretched hand. Told himself that the cold and the pallor were just the usual vampire nonsense, didn’t mean anything, even though he knew it wasn’t true. Adam’s fingers were limp in his, the inanimate lifelessness of a mannequin. Not like something recently dead, but like something that had never lived in the first place.

Ronan yanked him forward. It was an impulse born of equal parts anger and terror, his full strength behind it, and he regretted the action immediately. First, because the motion was rough enough to threaten injury, and God knew he’d rather die than hurt Adam. And second, because Adam -- this body that had been Adam -- moved with the cut-string ease of an uninhabited puppet. No tension or resistance whatsoever. Ronan placed his fingertips under Adam’s jaw, searching for the sluggish thud of his non-human heart. Ran his thumb over Adam’s mouth and prayed for a whisper of breath, Adam’s still-wet blood clinging to his skin. Lifted an eyelid and found an eye as blue and unresponsive and glazed as a glass marble.

He had a wild, half-hysterical thought that the entire night had been a setup, Adam had never called him at all, this was a doll in Adam’s shape, he was about to be cleverly ambushed by a vampire or a vampire hunter, which would be welcome because it meant Adam was tucked away somewhere safe. This body wasn’t Adam. None of this was real. A nightmare translated into waking-sharp lucidity, but a nightmare nonetheless.

_Please. Please. Please._

Adam fit too perfectly in his arms. The weight of him was right, the shape of him, the definition of the muscle and bone under his skin. The texture of his hair, underneath Ronan’s fingers, because one of Ronan’s shaking hands was running over the strands again and again without his conscious volition. The fabric of his faded and bleach-stained t-shirt, faded and bleach-stained jeans, faded and bleach-stained sneakers, and Ronan’s own breath was foreign to him. Someone had shut a wounded animal in here with them; no, the sound was coming from his chest, his throat.

_Please, God, please._

He couldn’t speak. His lips were forming words regardless, silent, probably prayers, but he had no idea which ones or who he was calling upon. His mind was screaming to God for something, anything, salvation, a bargain, a trade. His heart, on the other hand, whispered traitorously that God had better things to do than double check the shitty abandoned crawlspaces in shitty abandoned houses in shitty abandoned towns in shitty abandoned worlds.

God wasn’t here. There was no one here but Ronan and what remained of Adam. Ronan on his knees, bent over like a supplicant to avoid the too-low ceiling, his whole body jagged lines. Adam, held against Ronan’s chest, head lolled against Ronan’s shoulder, his body inverted curves and slipping gravity. If Ronan let him go, he’d fall, because there was nothing left inside him to hold him up.

No.

No.

No.

No, fuck that, actually. 

The fury blinded Ronan, reddened the edges of his vision. (_Onto anger,_ a clinical and detached voice told him, a little derisive, a little mocking. It sounded an awful lot like Adam’s.) He released his grip and let Adam sag against him. Shrugged off his jacket, peeled off his gloves. When he held up his hand, it was an elongated silhouette against the flashlight.

He clawed at his wristbands. Clawed at the skin underneath, too, in the process; it was a side effect of not caring, and his nails were too blunt to do damage besides. He tore at the bands, yanked on them, ripped them over his hand with enough ferocity that three out of five tooth-marked leather straps snapped. Flung the scattered pieces into the dust below the stairs. 

Everything below was pale skin and darker scar tissue, a pattern of inky shadow against washed-out white where the light blazed. Ages ago, lifetimes ago, Ronan had tried to get the demons inside him out; what remained of that ill-fated experiment was a map labeled _fuckup_ and the occasional concerned stares of strangers. He could feel it again, the rock crumbling under his soles, the updraft of wind from the abyss, the knowledge that falling would be a surrender to a scream that never stopped. Demons.

_Oh, God, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough._

No. No, fuck that. Fuck that. He wasn’t collapsing here. Horror had frozen him the day he’d found his father’s body, and when Gansey told him about the time he’d nearly (un?)died, and the first time he’d seen a vampire burn, and if he was being honest with himself, every time after that. Horror wasn’t going to lay him low now. It was not, really, that he’d gained strength or dealt with his fear or become a different person. It was more the knowledge that, if the roles were reversed, Adam would be calm and pragmatic and already calculating non-hysterical solutions. Ronan didn’t have Adam’s capacity for calm in a crisis, and he was definitely veering more toward nervous breakdown than rational endeavor, but he’d be damned if he couldn’t show Adam the same dedication that Adam would show him.

He sat down heavily, his back smacking the shelves so hard they rattled. His hands -- somehow moving with his heart’s intention without being attached to him at all, a disconnected spray of retina-seared images -- his hands turned Adam onto his back, laid his head in Ronan’s lap. They were a thousand times gentler than he’d been moments before.

Ronan wanted the new position to change something, but it didn’t. Adam’s body was still splayed like his limbs had casually flopped wherever God had cut his strings. His throat wasn’t moving. There was no breath in his lungs. The blood on his face didn’t make the display fatal -- blood on Adam’s chin was unusual given how neatly he ate, but not unheard of. What made the display fatal was the slack emptiness, the certainty that whatever had animated this body was no longer inside it.

Ronan pressed his newly-bared arm against Adam’s mouth. Bleeding was easy; Adam’s fangs were sharpened daggers even when he wasn’t applying biting pressure. Ronan let the beaded droplets drip into Adam’s slack mouth. “Come on, you bastard,” he muttered. His voice sounded like his own again. Having something physical to do had halted the spiral of his hurricane, however temporarily. (_Onto negotiation, now,_ Adam’s amused voice told him. _You look like a movie hero trying CPR on someone who’s been dead for days._)

Ronan ignored it. “Come on,” he muttered again, changing the angle so Adam’s teeth could sink in properly, dig into the meat below the skin. The result wasn’t the kind of injury that would require hospitalization, but it was risky, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of move to pull when there was still a good chance of ambush. If Ronan was going to do this, it should have been with Adam stretched out in the backseat of the BMW while Declan accelerated them ever-faster toward the Barns. It should have been with the breathless air of an ambulance ride, not the airless breath of a tomb.

There wasn’t _time._

“You know I’ll fucking kill you. You know that, right?” The lacerations were deep enough for Ronan to function as the vampire equivalent to a water fountain, but he knew what it felt like to be drunk from, and this wasn’t it. There was no curious press of Adam’s tongue, no suction from his lips, no sound of his swallow in the dusty silence. Ronan might as well have been smearing his blood on the shelves and calling it magic.

He continued speaking regardless. The edge fell away, and underneath it was something low and tired, half a murmur and half a croon. The Adam-asshole portion of Ronan’s mind pointed out that he was losing it in the most overtly cliched, movie-asylum patient way possible; Ronan snapped back (in his head, and not out loud, probably, though he wasn’t confident in his ability to tell) that he was aware he was self-soothing and that Adam couldn’t hear him and that he already knew he deserved to suffer and that his asshole brain could, in fact, fuck off. If his asshole brain could stop offering voyeuristic commentary altogether, that would be great, actually. 

Having established this, he returned his attention to his breakdown.

“I’ll fucking kill you,” he told Adam again. His free hand, though, was tracing the bridge of Adam’s nose and the sharp angles of his cheekbones and the curve of his forehead and each strand of hair stuck to his temples, so the threat didn’t carry much weight. “God, you loser, you sack of shit, I can’t fucking believe you. You starve yourself your whole life, you’ve got a holy water scar the size of Lake fucking Michigan that you -- I don’t even know what you fucking did, crawled into a hole to heal from, I fucking guess -- and you’re gonna choke on a little silver? Jesus, I can’t believe you’re making it that easy. Felled by a bottle from an herbal supplement store. So much for scary supernatural being, you useless goddamn waste of space. It’s shitheads like you that give vampires a bad name.”

Insulting Adam had the same calming effect as a sedative. Mainly because he could imagine Adam’s response a hell of a lot more clearly than he could for any maudlin confessions. It was another roundabout form of denial, this fake inside-out normal conversation, but the world was ending, and Ronan was gonna snatch at any relief he could get.

He was still bleeding. He didn’t know how much blood he’d lost, on a technical level. Not enough to be dangerous, certainly, but maybe enough for his brain to flood him with blood-pressure-reducing exhausted survival chemicals. Ronan closed his eyes. “I can’t do it, man,” he whispered. “I can’t do it. You think I’m gonna walk out of here, break the news to Gansey and Blue, breeze through a couple grief counseling sessions, call it a day? You’re out of your goddamn mind. I can’t do it. I’m not like you.”

The shape of the next few hours was becoming clear. Assuming he and Declan weren’t murdered in the next ten minutes, he’d need to gather Adam against his chest and carry him to the car, and he’d need to fight with Declan about burying a vampire on the property, or not fight with Declan if Declan decided not to be an asshole, and he’d need to tell Gansey and Blue, and he’d need to let them both cling to him while they crumbled apart, and he’d need to remember he wasn’t going to hear Adam laugh again, and he’d need to throw up a couple times and find a place he could scream. His body would do all those things for him whether or not he was present, because they needed to get done.

Ronan knew, logically, that he had to get up. If nothing else, he needed to bandage his injured arm. He did have a finite supply of blood inside him, and clearly Adam wasn’t using it.

And then Adam choked.

Ronan’s eyes flew open. Adam’s were still closed. For a moment, Ronan thought he’d hallucinated both the sound and the living pressure of Adam’s mouth. His brain wasn’t reliable on a good day, and this was not a good day. But then Adam choked again, a gargling cough, and his body spasmed in a jerky convulsion that did not feel remotely like a hallucination.

Ronan pulled his arm away from Adam’s teeth. He wasn’t sure if Adam was trying to cough up silver-tainted tissue or breathe around a rudely gifted river of human blood. Ronan placed his hand on the nape of Adam’s neck and tipped his head back. Adam’s pained swallow was, without question, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. He ran his thumb along the side of Adam’s throat, no pressure, no threat, just marveling at the twitch of muscle and sinew below the skin. God. Thank God. Thank God. He was going to worship every single creepy thing about Adam until the day he died.

Adam’s eyes opened. These, too, Ronan wanted to memorize, even though Adam’s eyes already made up a fairly key chunk of his existing memories, because they were _alive._ Hazy, and confused, and pained, with too-wide pupils and too much red in the sclera, but they were Adam’s eyes, and Adam was looking at him, and Adam was going to _survive._

“I,” Adam mumbled, and his voice was slurred, and he swallowed again, “shouldn’t’ve tipped the barista. Murder’s... rude.”

Something inside Ronan broke. 

He’d thought he was losing it, before, but it immediately became clear that his breakdown had been understated. His laugh emerged a strangled sob. The relief opened the dam’s gate. He’d been holding back the torrential flood because it was useless, and devastating, and empty, and it wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. And now Adam was fine, and it was still a bad time for this, least of all because there might be killer vampire hunters around and most of all because Adam hated feelings, and Ronan was crying anyway, and there was not a force on this goddamn earth that could stop it.

“Oh,” Adam said. He didn’t sound overtly displeased or uncomfortable. More confused by the spectacle, like someone watching a dog perform a new and pointless trick. His fingers twitched, and it took a couple tries for him to lift his hand, like he had to reteach himself the motions. Rather than touch Ronan with his palm, he slung his arm haphazardly over Ronan’s neck instead, pulling himself up. “That seems. Excessive.”

“You _bastard_,” Ronan said furiously, between a laugh and another sob.

And then Adam was kissing him, or he was kissing Adam, and his fingers weaved streaks of red through Adam’s dusty hair -- his own blood and Adam’s both -- and Adam’s mouth tasted of metal and rust and bile, and Adam’s sharp teeth nicked Ronan’s lip, and Ronan wanted to punch him, and the salt of his tears created tiny crystalline deposits between them, and there was not a goddamn thing soft or romantic about it, and Ronan had never been so happy in his entire _fucking_ life.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it turns out being nearly poisoned to death sucks ass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a warning for this chapter: it involves adam being very sick with basically the vampire flu. i was as non-graphic as i could manage with descriptions, but it's pretty much the key plot point here, so there was only so much i could do  
there's also a lot of deconstruction of adam's headspace, mentions of past abuse, mild internalized ableism, etc. basically anything you'd expect to find in a plumbing of adam parrish's Issues.
> 
> so! part one was all the drama and tension, and now part two is the release and working out of that tension. hope you guys enjoy.

Adam knew he’d been dead.

He knew it the same way that he knew when he was thirsty, or when there were vulnerable humans around him, or when he was too hurt to move. Adam’s body fed him truths about himself and his environment that, more often than not, tended toward provable fact. So Adam knew he’d been dead, even if he couldn’t remember anything beyond passing out, and he knew that Ronan’s blood had brought him back.

_Ronan_ had brought him back.

Unfortunately, he had to stop kissing Ronan when his body rebelled. The blood had lent his body strength to purge more of the poison inside him. He rolled off of Ronan’s lap, bracing himself on his hands and knees, and retched. It wasn’t pretty.

“Jesus,” Ronan muttered. Adam retched again, miserably, and tried not to sag to the ground. “Okay, I’m taking you home. You gonna let me carry you, or are you gonna be really Adam about it?”

A callback to his earlier words. Adam’s eyesight was shot; Ronan was a shadowy blur against a haze of dim light and pain. Still, Adam could make out the darkness of the blood smeared all over the lower half of his face.

Adam raised a middle finger, elegantly. Then unbalanced and just barely managed to avoid the nasty puddle on the ground as he collapsed. Less elegantly.

He might have swum out of consciousness. At any rate, he wasn’t certain of the mechanics involved in Ronan dragging him out of the crawlspace without making a bigger mess of either of them. His next awareness was the warmth of Ronan’s chest, the dizziness of being lifted into the air, the soft pant of Ronan’s breathing. 

Everything felt backwards, sideways. He should have been able to smell Ronan as easily as see him, should have been able to hear the thudding of his heart and sense the blood underneath his skin. It was like someone had stuffed cotton into Adam’s brain, his eyes, his ears, his nose. He knew Ronan was safe because he was Adam, and he knew Ronan was food because he was a vampire, but the _safe food_ knowledge was about as helpful as a mosquito’s. A trap could spring closed and he’d have no one to blame but his shitty, misdirecting senses.

God, he didn’t feel well.

His body wanted to swim away. Surrendering back to sleep would have been easy. It might even have been the right call, an active choice to conserve his energy so his body could heal itself. He was useless no matter what, and so it didn’t make sense to stay awake. But in the same line of thought, he was also still badly frightened, and going to sleep might mean failing to wake up. His survival tended to depend on staying conscious long enough to drag himself to safety; Ronan’s presence was a miracle, but it wouldn’t undo a lifetime of instinct. Adam clung to what remained of his senses.

Ronan carried him back to the window; he felt each step as a dull thudding ache through his bones. Hoisted him up into unfamiliar arms. Adam’s panic spiked as the stranger dragged him through the hole. He thrashed, or thought he did. Definitely hissed. Lashed out with a hand, snapped his teeth. His eyes hurt too badly when he opened them to make out any details beyond a silhouette and a baking orange streetlamp glow.

Gloved hands caught his wrists, held them still. Adam drew breath to scream. It came out a choking, hissed gasp. “Easy, Parrish,” the guy holding him -- Declan, he’d been on the phone with Declan, he knew this voice -- said placidly.

“Let _go.”_ He meant to snarl, but everything was still sideways, which meant it came out half a sob instead. The worst part of the helplessness was knowing that other people _weren’t_ helpless. His sensory data points had narrowed to sickly orange light, pressure on his wrists, grass and dirt and gravel against his stomach where his shirt rucked up. To everyone else, this scene made sense. To everyone else, he was a dying wreck either worth pitying or killing. Adam would have given anything for his brain to start working right. Even total paralysis alongside the wakefulness would have been better; at least then he’d know what was going _on._

“Adam.” Ronan, behind him, levering himself out of the basement. Of course. Of course he wouldn’t be able to hoist both himself and Adam out through the high window. It stood to reason that he’d lift Adam out first. “Oh, what the fuck, Declan, let him go.”

“God fucking forbid I hold a vampire back from biting my arm off,” Declan snapped, but the pressure around Adam’s wrists released. Which meant he slumped forward, a wreck at the edge of the parking lot’s asphalt, retching again though it felt like there couldn’t be anything left for his stomach to bring up.

“Adam.” Ronan’s hand rested against the middle of his spine, pressed to the fabric of his shirt. Adam couldn’t have explained how he knew the hand was Ronan’s -- there should have been scent in Ronan’s shape, reverberating sound waves, a mental map he didn’t need eyes for. Instead, he was piecing together clues based on limited sensory information. Warm, steady pressure on his back. Ronan’s voice low, close to his hearing ear, which meant he must have been kneeling beside Adam.

The pressure settled some of the terror. It shouldn’t have; certainly there wasn’t any logical reasoning. It was just that Adam’s instincts associated Ronan with safety and satiation and rest. Somehow, Ronan had snuck his way onto the very short list of individuals Adam trusted even while delirious with pain and fear.

“You’re fucked to hell right now.” Ronan’s voice, still low, quiet. If Adam pretended hard enough, he could imagine they were laying outside the Barns shooting the shit and making fun of the cattle before they moved inside for Adam to feed. “I know you’re gonna want to take care of yourself, but you’re fucked to hell. Can you trust me?”

It was like he was inside Adam’s thoughts without seeing them at all. The sentiment struck Adam as an absurdity, a washed-out surrealist painting. _Can_ you trust me was different from _do_ you trust me. _Can you trust me?_ was a question that assumed sacrifice. In Ronan's mind, Adam didn’t trust him as they were, but he might be able to muster some faith under extreme circumstances.

Ridiculous. As if Adam would have called Ronan in the first place if he didn’t consider himself safe in Ronan’s hands.

“Yeah.” Adam pushed himself to his knees, his arms quaking, threatening to buckle beneath him.

“Okay. I’m picking you up again.”

And Ronan did. Once more, the sudden shift spun into nausea, but Adam had to admit it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Ronan’s grip was tight without being painful. Adam nosed into the side of his neck, seeking out Ronan’s scent to ground himself, something earthy and dark and dripping with gasoline. He followed the plane of Ronan’s bare skin under the collar of his jacket --

“You gotta let go of me so I can put you in the car, man,” Ronan told him. The timbre of his voice had changed, a little. “I’ve got blood bags with me.”

To his horror, Adam discovered he’d sunk his teeth into the soft meat at the junction of Ronan’s neck and shoulder, drinking without meaning to. He’d never bitten a person unintentionally before, not even in his most feral hunger, and he didn't understand what had prompted it now. He unclamped his jaw, tried to wrangle an apology into coherence.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fucking delicious, I know,” Ronan said. “It’s a curse. Here.” A low grunt as he shifted his grip, a click and pop of a door opening. Then the cool leather seats of the BMW. Adam gratefully allowed his shitty body to slump across them.

“Oh, what the fuck - hold on.” Ronan shut the door.

Adam lifted his head enough to make out that there were more than two human-shaped silhouettes outside the car, which meant that Ronan and Declan had been joined by company. He managed to squint at the blurry picture for about five seconds before the stabby orange knives drilled deep enough into his skull to threaten renewed sickness. It didn’t help that the blood he’d just drunk was picking out pieces of poison and begging to release them. Better out than in.

He dropped his head, squeezed his eyes shut, and turned his body toward the back of the seats. If anyone came for him here, all they’d find would be a twitchy mess of curled up limbs. In some ways, the darkness and quiet of human-level senses was welcome; he wasn’t sure he wanted to construct a vivid mental picture of what was happening outside the car.

It might have been one minute or ten when the door nearest his head opened. “Just me,” Ronan said, and lifted Adam by the shoulders so he could slide neatly onto the seat. Adam let his cheek rest against Ronan’s thigh, making a vaguely irritated noise as Ronan jostled him by leaning forward and rummaging up near the gearshift.

“Gotta bandage my arm,” Ronan said by way of apology. “Don’t know how you manage to bite so fucking neatly all the time. Your teeth are like ice skates. Has anyone ever told you you’re a killing machine? Freaky shit.”

Rather than dignify this with a response, Adam put his energy into other things. “Who’s out there?”

“Your hunters. Declan’s having a spirited conversation with them. That he intends to finish as soon as you and I are home safe.”

“He gonna stuff them in the trunk?”

A scoff. “He’s not dumb enough to bring these assholes to the Barns. That’s the kind of shit my dad would do.”

“He gonna kill them?”

“I don’t know.” There was no wavering or anxiety in Ronan’s voice. “And I don’t care.”

“Doesn’t sound like you.”

“I’m a man of hidden depths.”

Adam hummed. “I’m gonna throw up.” 

This wasn’t because of the possibility of murder on the horizon. Adam was certain he was more okay with the theoretical concept of murder than Ronan was. His body was just not currently a fan of keeping down fluids, even fluids politely donated from a disaster ex-hunter’s veins.

“Hold on.” A wrinkling of plastic, a clinical peeling sound. “Here.” Ronan nudged him to roll over, held an open garbage bag under his face. “Throw up in this.”

Adam did.

“Gross.”

Adam kind of had to agree with him here.

“Drink this.” When Adam cracked his eyes open, Ronan was holding a plastic bag of donated blood in front of him like a human tempting a cat with treats. His wrist was bandaged, little spots of scarlet soaking through the gauze. The gash would need a more thorough cleaning once they were back at the Barns, Adam was sure.

Adam angled his head back against Ronan’s stomach so that his fangs wouldn’t accidentally pierce the plastic. “I can’t. God. God, I can feel it _in me.”_

“I’m not expecting you to keep it down. You need to flush out the silver. Every time the blood comes up, so does a little poison. When you’re actually keeping it down, we’ll know you’ve gotten rid of as much as you physically can.”

_“God,”_ Adam said.

“Yeah.” Ronan’s tone wasn’t malicious, cruel, or pitying. Simply factual. “It’s gonna be a long fucking night, Parrish.”

\---

If Adam had thought the night had been long before, that was nothing compared to what came after.

The drive back to the Barns was just a collection of blurred images. Declan, sliding into the driver’s seat, pulling a wet wipe out of the glove box. Turning said wipe crimson with the blood that had previously been invisible against his black gloves. Ronan dryly thanking him for not getting bodily fluids on the steering wheel. The thrum of the engine like a purring animal. A lot of drinking blood, an action that sickened Adam as much as it sated him, leaving him unable to tell whether he was actually thirsty or not. A lot of helpfully dumping the blood into the trash can a minute or two later. Ronan snapping at Declan to take the curves slower. Declan’s sneer in the rearview mirror. Ronan’s hand in Adam’s hair. His fingertips scritching at Adam’s scalp. The anxious skittering tap of his other hand against the armrest.

It wasn’t a long drive by any stretch of the imagination, but any time spent in a moving vehicle feels longer when you’re desperately ill. Adam was relieved to haul himself out of the car and take in open-mouthed gasps of the fresh air surrounding the Barns, leaning heavily against Ronan’s side so he could stand up straight.

Part of his insistence on standing was stubbornness, and part of it was the need for reassurance. Yes, his body was returning to equilibrium; yes, he was still twitchy, and his gait was unsteady and slow, but that he could walk at all was an indication of returning motor function. Ronan allowed Adam to continue using his body as an overglorified crutch as he stumbled his way to the porch, an endeavor undertaken with more patience than Adam typically expected from Ronan. Declan, meanwhile, transferred himself from the BMW to his Volvo, then pulled out of the driveway to go finish whatever business he’d started.

Adam’s legs finally did give out when he tried to climb the porch steps. Part of him was absurdly, stupidly grateful that Declan hadn’t witnessed the humiliation. Part of him was absurdly, stupidly humiliated that Ronan _had_ witnessed it. Part of him was absurdly, stupidly ashamed when Ronan lifted him back up without question.

“I hate this,” he muttered. Speech was getting better, too. Not perfect -- vowels were too long and consonants stuttered on his tongue -- but it was easier to put sentences together. “I want it on the record that I hate this. I hate it. You being able to haul me around like a sack of potatoes is convenient, not sexy.”

Adam hadn’t made a study of Ronan’s face, and his head was currently tucked back against Ronan’s shoulder, but he could _hear_ the Eyebrow in Ronan’s voice. “I didn’t say a goddamn word about it being sexy, Parrish,” he observed, not pausing as he carried Adam inside and started up the stairs. He didn’t even sound winded. “You’re the one making it weird.”

“You were working up to a comment. I could feel it.”

“Honestly, if being able to haul you around like a sack of potatoes doesn’t speak for itself, no poetry ever will.”

Adam managed, with some effort, not to press his tongue back to the still-uncovered bite mark on Ronan’s shoulder. “Like how you having blood is convenient. You’re basically just an elevator right now.”

“Well, I guess I’m nothing if not a pile of convenient physical traits squashed into one human body. Goddamn. When you wound, you wound deep.”

Ronan flicked on a light -- Adam flinched, closed his eyes -- moved across a room, entered another. When he set Adam down, the sudden darkness was cool enough that Adam risked peeking.

Ronan had set him down in a bathtub, one of those giant whirlpool jet numbers that looked like it belonged in a five star hotel or a penthouse suite, closer to a miniature hot tub than anything Adam would traditionally call a shower. The world was different without the sharpness of his vampire senses. Ronan hadn’t turned on the light in here, so the bathroom was illuminated through thin strips of artificial rays through the cracked door. Adam thought he made out stencils and handpainted swirls on the walls, a double vanity, a small closet.

Things may have looked different enough to be alien, but Adam was confident he'd never been inside this room with his senses intact, either. Though it was an average bathroom, he was certain he’d have remembered the tub. The cool press of ceramic against his skin soothed something that might have been burning or inflammation, so he let himself slump down further against the side.

Ronan leaned over one of the sinks and switched on a night light plugged into the wall. A dim, dark blue glow emitted from it, casting the room in the hue of the deep ocean. It was clearly a light designed to keep from waking people, and so it didn’t hurt Adam’s head the way the bright yellow or saturated orange did.

For a second, he blinked, studying Ronan’s face. Though Ronan tended to sprout stubble like fields sprouted dandelions in the spring, Adam was sure he couldn’t have grown that dark a shadow since the last time they’d seen each other. Then he remembered, winced. It was just the blood still smeared over his chin. Ronan hadn’t washed it off yet.

There was pretty much no way Declan didn’t know they’d made out. Practically, this fact was the least of Adam’s concerns. His shitty brain still pointed it out first.

As though reading his thoughts, Ronan turned the tap, scrubbed water over his face to clear the blood. Dug through the little closet until he came out with another first aid kit -- the Lynches appeared to tuck them in every nook and cranny of the house like an Easter egg hunt -- and then sat on the lid of the toilet to begin cleaning his wrist and shoulder properly. Adam was close enough to touch him. Close enough to memorize the creases in his rarely-worn hunter pants.

“I just want it on the record,” Adam said again, “that I hate this.”

“I heard you loud and clear the first time, Parrish,” Ronan replied. There was something beautiful about his hands as he dabbed at his wounds with antiseptic, rewrapped bandages, pressed gauze over teeth marks. Or maybe it was just the hazy blue glow turning everything ethereal. “Just so we’re clear, this ain’t a picnic for me either. You’re fucking heavy.”

It was about then that Adam realized how shallowly and rapidly Ronan was breathing. He did what he’d been thinking about since Ronan sat down and laid his hand on Ronan’s knee. “You’re hurt.”

“Glad to see your unmatched observational skills are coming back,” Ronan snapped, scrubbing a smear of blood from his knuckles with a wipe.

“No, I mean…” 

Adam didn’t know what he meant. Or rather, he did, but he didn’t know how to translate it into words, which was both frustrating and concerning. It was a sentiment he should have been able to express. He meant that if his instincts and senses were calibrated like they were supposed to be, he’d have noticed Ronan’s breathing earlier. He meant that he was certain Ronan’s heart was beating too fast. He meant that Ronan’s hands were shaking with a fine tremor nearly as pronounced as Adam’s own. He meant that for all the badassery and strength Ronan had shown tonight, in this moment he kind of looked like an injured gazelle.

“I’m fine. I just need a second.” Ronan finished bandaging himself, snapped the kit shut. “I lost some blood, I’ve been running on adrenaline, the adrenaline’s wearing off. Typical shit.”

Adam drew his hand back, shame curdling in his stomach, begging his body to hunch down as deep and small in the tub as it could get.

Ronan didn’t let him. Ronan caught his fingers, squeezed them. “It wasn’t you. Relax. You got maybe two mouthfuls when you bit me. Before that, that was all me. Don’t spiral.”

“I wasn’t spiraling,” Adam said, very aware that he had, in fact, been spiraling. Or about to spiral.

“Look. If I go downstairs, chug some orange juice, have a granola bar, can you keep from passing out? I’ll be so fucking pissed if you make me deal with a second near-death crisis.”

This seemed ripe for snarky responses, but Adam just said, “I’ll be fine.” Then, as Ronan reached the doorway, “Where are we?”

A pause. “At the Barns,” Ronan said, cautious.

“I don’t have _amnesia,”_ Adam said, matching the caution with impatience. “I meant specifically.”

“My parents’ bathroom.”

Ah. That explained why Adam had never seen the place. Not only had he never ventured into Niall and Aurora Lynch’s room, but it had also never occurred to him to do so. He’d slept in Declan’s childhood bedroom a few times, followed by Matthew’s now that Declan was home, and God knew he’d seen Ronan’s room and the rest of the house. Somehow, though, the personal memorabilia of a dead vampire hunter and his puzzling wife had never piqued his interest.

He wasn’t sure what to make of this. There were plenty of other serviceable bathrooms in the house. Ones that had toiletries, even, besides a dusty first aid kit in the closet. In here, the sink was bare of soap or moisturizer or toothpaste, the shelf of the tub was empty, the toilet had no accompanying tissue or plunger. It was a skeletal room, uninhabited. Ghostlike.

Adam was left to ponder this for about ten minutes. Five minutes in, his body reminded him insistently that there was still poison inside it, a clawing scrabble of nauseous inside-out thirst. The twenty minutes in the BMW had offered enough of this disgusting haze to last a lifetime, but he leaned forward, dry heaving again. The five minutes after that were spent dissecting the puzzle pieces of the new environment because he desperately needed a distraction from how badly his _everything_ hurt.

Ronan found Adam curled on himself, his spine an elegant C, jaw so tense it was a wonder no bones had cracked. His mouth was bleeding. The fangs wouldn’t _retract,_ which was annoying, and which meant he was a lot more prone to tearing himself up than usual.

Ronan pressed another blood bag into his hand. “Here.”

Adam bit down hard enough that he felt liquid splash over his bottom lip and down his front. His shirt had probably been bloodstained and ruined to begin with, but now it was certainly beyond hope. This messiness had also occurred with a few of the bags in the BMW, but at least then he’d been able to blame the motion of the car.

The worst part was knowing how he looked from the outside. Shaking, fevered, pallid, ill. Swallowing human blood like an addict giving up the ghost three days into withdrawal. Making a fucking mess of himself. It wasn’t that he seemed feral, he knew. He knew what he looked like feral, and he didn’t enjoy it, but even that would have been better than _this._ This was just small, and weak, and pathetic, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it, because he couldn’t control his own _fucking body._

The second worst part was knowing that Ronan would know. Ronan was aware of how important Adam’s control was. God knew he’d been living with the delicate, bordering-on-obsessive way Adam bit him and occasionally Gansey and blood bags and anything else he needed to sink his teeth into. God knew he’d seen Adam at his worst, when Adam had been so sick with hunger that he’d nearly torn out Ronan’s throat, and even _that_ had been less pitiful than this.

It was only the second worst part because Adam watching himself was somehow more intolerable than Ronan watching him. He wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Yeah, that’s why I figured a tub was best,” Ronan said, unperturbed. “Way easier to clean up.”

Adam finished draining the bag and only spilled a little. Then he tugged at the hem of his sodden shirt. The first attempt to pull it over his head didn’t work, because his fingers seized up with an inexplicable cramp partway through. And now he was afraid, really afraid -- surviving a silver poisoning didn’t necessarily mean full recovery, and nothing in the world mattered more than his ability to make his body and mind do what he intended--

“Help me with this,” he said. He meant it to be casual, to offset the awfulness of needing Ronan’s help with getting undressed, but the fear came through, so everything about it was awful anyway.

Ronan did so without spite or commentary. He’d settled down on the other side of the tub, legs splayed carelessly across the bathroom floor, leaning on the ceramic. Everything about his posture was so casual that it had to be performance. Adam was both irritated that he was managing to pull off what Adam himself couldn’t, and immeasurably grateful that he was making the effort.

“You want the jeans to go too?” Ronan asked.

Adam nodded. Probably all his clothes were ruined either way, but it didn’t matter. “Leave my boxers.”

The pants he managed to get off himself; the hardest part was undoing the belt with his uncooperative hands, but then Ronan just had to steady him as he kicked them away and toed off his sneakers. Ronan lifted the jeans and shoes from their sad, wadded-up pile on the floor of the tub and set them with Adam’s shirt on the toilet lid.

By the time they’d managed this, Adam’s body had decided it was unhappy with the blood it had just been given, or very happy with the chance to purge more poison. Either way, it was choking unpleasantness down the drain, his spine bent again, and Ronan’s hand once more gentle against his back.

“Don’t pity me,” Adam managed, when he’d regained enough control to drag in a few unmarred breaths.

“I’m not. Jesus.” 

Ronan sounded angry. That was good. Angry Ronan was a Ronan who wasn’t swallowing his feelings or tiptoeing around Adam, which meant he was telling the truth. Adam stole a glance at Ronan’s face. Glacier eyes made darker by the ocean lighting, narrow turned-down mouth, twitching cheek muscle, tense jaw. He looked both dangerous and soft, like a painting of a viper done in a cool, blended palette. A diffuse camera shot backlit for warmth. God. The blurriness of human vision was fucking with Adam’s head.

“I mean it,” Adam said. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Fuck you.” Ronan’s stare bored into his, shadowed and tightened and furious. For a moment, Adam thought he’d leave the sentiment at that, but then he continued, “Someone has to be a big enough asshole to keep you breathing.”

He pressed another bag into Adam’s hand. He’d dragged up at least a dozen, packed into a bulging satchel resting on the floor near him.

Adam closed his eyes, broke the staring contest. He didn’t want to do this.

Ronan sighed. A long, long exhalation, like he was consciously letting all the air out of his lungs. When he spoke, the edge had vanished from his voice, but his tone didn’t have the unhappy waver Adam associated with pity. “Long fucking night ahead of us, Parrish.”

And it was.

It was long, and awful, just a slow trade of one pain for another. The silver trickled from his system, but the cost of that was an ache in his muscles so profound he could barely move, an inability to catch his breath, a slow roiling illness. It was pretty much exactly what Adam expected it to be, and somehow managed to be much worse than he’d anticipated.

Around the sixth bag, he shuddered and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “It’s a waste,” he said. “People donated this for _humans._ To help humans who need it. Do you know how underserved blood drives are? It’s fine if I’m only drinking once in a while, but going through the whole supply -- it’s not even _feeding_ me, it’s just going down the drain, it’s a _waste.”_

“You’re gonna be real fucking hard pressed to get me to agree with you there,” Ronan said, “on account of how it’s saving your life, which is exactly what people who donate blood mean for it to do. Save lives.”

Adam was pretty sure that was wildly offensive, even if it was a little sweet that Ronan had the capacity to frame it like that. “There won’t be anywhere open this time of night,” Adam said, “but soon as it hits daybreak, go get me some animal blood instead. If I’m doing this then it’s damn well not gonna be -- God, I’m not doing it like this. I've already wasted like three entire human beings worth of blood.”

“I am absolutely fucking not doing that.”

“Fine. You don’t have to leave. Ask Declan. I’ll pay him back. Extra, for the gas, and whatever fee he wants for doing it, too.”

“I’m not doing that either.”

“Ronan.”

“No, you listen to me. I don’t give a _fuck_ if you think you’re worth it or not, I don’t give a fuck how sick you do or don’t think you are, I don’t give a fuck about your neuroses and your complexes and your principles. I don’t give a fuck. Animal blood won’t work as well, and we’re not doing it.”

“I think I’m past the danger of dying.” Adam tested the statement as he said it, found it tasted like truth. “Whatever I’m purging at this point is the tracest amounts. Barely measurable.”

“I don’t care.”

“Ronan.”

Ronan removed another bag from the satchel, held it over the lip of the tub. “Here.”

Adam shook his head. “I’m done.”

“Like fuck you are.”

“I’m done with human blood. I’m done.” He took a deep breath. “It’s my choice.”

Because it was his choice. Adam was allowed to weigh his principles against likely outcomes and decide which equation balanced. He was allowed to choose what happened to his body, what went into it, who touched it. These choices had been stripped from him tonight. Saying no felt like regaining some measure of control, but that wasn’t the only reason behind the decision.

There was a moment of stretching tension between them. The second spooled out and tightened, going taut in the middle, threatening to snap. In most circumstances, Adam was stronger than Ronan, so the idea of Ronan hurting him was a non-starter. Tonight, Adam was basically a human with sharp teeth and the flu, and Ronan was a muscular ex-hunter who had both height and mass advantages. If Ronan wanted to force him, he could, and both of them knew it.

Ronan slid down against the side of the tub. He rested his forehead on the ceramic. Adam couldn’t see his face from this angle, but he suspected Ronan’s eyes were closed. One of Ronan’s hands lifted and then rested on the back of his own shaved head, all the joints in his fingers pressed into tense, spindly lines. Adam heard his breath, another one of those long and slow exhales.

Then he sat up, and his expression was removed, remote. “Okay,” he said. “It’s your choice. I’ll get you animal blood.”

Adam had not expected acquiescence that fast. “I -- thank you. Are you--” Asking if Ronan was all right was idiotic, so he changed tacks. “I’m not trying to be an asshole.”

“Neither am I.”

“You can be mad at me. Shit. It’s freaking me out that you’re not mad.”

“Oh, I’m mad.” Ronan’s cheek twitched again as he said it. “It’s not gonna change a damn thing, though, and if I start, I’m gonna say things I regret.”

It was worse to know Ronan was thinking awful things than to hear them spoken. “Say them.”

Ronan bit down for two more seconds, and then he gave up. “You don’t give a fuck about anyone but yourself.”

Adam stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t give a _fuck,_ Parrish. About me or Gansey or Blue or any of it. You don’t give a single goddamn fuck. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Yeah, you’re real noble, pulling out statistics about blood drives and the Red Cross and how some sad hypothetical child is gonna die because you drank, fuck that. You don’t care about that. You’re making up a reason that sounds good in your head so you can tell yourself you aren’t being selfish.”

“I,” Adam started, and found himself lost for words, and then picked up the thread of his thoughts again, “cannot believe you’re making this about you.”

“Oh, no, it’s not about me. It’s not about me. I’m not so stupid I think I take up any space in the great Adam Parrish’s head!” Ronan’s laugh was sharp, acidic. There was something else, here, something wrong and crumbling that Adam needed to grasp at, to piece back together. “This is about you being a fucking _coward.”_

Adam sought a retort and found he was truly lost for words now.

“You’re a fucking coward,” Ronan snarled, ruthless. “Bullshit it’s about animal blood and ethics and percentages of silver being purged. It’s about how you want to wait hours for the damage to settle, swallow a mouthful of deer blood or what-fucking-ever, keep from choking on it, and say there was nothing else you could do. It’s about how you don’t want to fight because it’s uncomfortable for what, a few _hours?_ Not even a full day! Coward.”

Adam leaned against the back of the tub and dragged a shaky hand over his face. Ronan’s words stung like truth. Adam wasn’t sure if they really were true, or if they were just Ronan’s version of the truth, or if there was any difference between those two concepts.

Ronan wasn’t finished. Given permission to be cruel, he'd become a tidal wave that could not be stopped. It was easy to see why he’d been holding back. “So yeah, I’m fucking angry. I’m fucking pissed. You don’t want me pitying you? Good. I _haven’t._ It didn’t even fucking _occur_ to me, you piece of shit. I’ve just seen you outrun vampire hunters and keep walking while your organs shut down and wrestle death itself and stay composed while you’ve got poison tearing apart your insides, do you have any fucking clue -- the _strength_ that takes, like I’d find that pitiful, no, no, fuck you. Not an option on the menu. So what, the strongest guy I know is gonna give up because of a couple flu symptoms? That? That’s _pathetic._ That’s fucking pitiful. That’s fucking _contemptuous._ Fuck you.”

Adam waited until the silence had stretched for about ten seconds, then reached out and laid a hand on Ronan’s shoulder. They were face to face, like this, Ronan’s silhouette backlit by the night light, his expression all hollows and shadows, just the ceramic of the tub wall between them.

“You done now?” Adam asked quietly.

Ronan shut his eyes. “Yeah. I’m done. And it won’t mean a thing. Never fucking does. Adam Parrish, army of one.”

Adam let his hand slide over Ronan’s shoulder, over the bandaged bite mark, over the curve of his neck, up to his jaw. When he laid his palm against Ronan’s cheek, Ronan made a low, wounded sound, nuzzling into him like he couldn’t stop himself.

Adam laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t a malicious laugh. Just small, helpless, a little bewildered. Something was different between them, now, a change more weighted than any he’d felt after they’d kissed.

“God,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve ever let loose at me like that.”

The furrow between Ronan’s brows was just a dark line in his hollowed-out expression. He seemed to have run out of words, an achievement Adam hadn't previously thought possible. Maybe they were just trading off speechlessness.

“God,” Adam repeated. “No one’s yelled at me like that since -- Blue, I think. Yeah, Blue was the last time. For lying to her about my blood supply.”

“You’re such a _dick.”_ Ronan’s voice was just as helpless and bewildered as the laugh.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Adam nodded. “You're right. I just wanted to be done. I’ll get the rest of it out of me. I’ll use the human blood. It’ll be fine.”

Ronan’s swallow was thick enough that Adam could hear it, human level, one ear deaf. Ronan brought his own hand up to lay over Adam’s where it rested on his cheek. Then turned his face and very, very gently kissed Adam’s palm.

“God.” Something painful stuck in Adam’s throat. “Ronan.”

“I need you,” Ronan said, and fell silent.

At first, Adam thought it was an aborted sentence, incomplete. Any number of potential endings. _I need you to be safe. I need you to give a fuck. I need you to take care of yourself. I need you to be less of an asshole. I need you to stop stringing me along like it’s fucking funny to watch me rip myself open and bleed for your attention._

Then he realized that was the whole statement. _I need you._

Adam did not make a habit of needing people. The flip side of this was that he did not encourage people to need _him._ Ronan’s dig about being a selfish asshole might have hit the mark. Because if people needed Adam, he couldn’t break ties without causing more damage than he wanted to. He was already in deep with Gansey and Blue; they were family, part of his heart, and committed to him. But neither Gansey nor Blue had ever said this. Adam wouldn’t have wanted them to. He was not certain he wanted Ronan to, either. Probably it was something they’d need to talk about.

For now, though, he let his forehead thunk gently against Ronan’s. “Okay,” he said. “I’m telling you right now that’s gonna be a problem, but it doesn’t have to be tonight. We can table it for later.”

Ronan’s breath was a whispering ghost against his mouth. “So there will be a later.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “There will be a later.”

Ronan dragged in a shaky inhale. “Okay.” Then, rougher, sounding much more like himself, “Okay.” He pulled back and handed Adam yet another one of the bags from hell. Adam would be lucky if he could ever feed again after this without feeling sick. “Let’s get back to the grossnasty vomitfest, then.”

\---

It was a few hours later that Adam reached his breaking point.

Not with Ronan. Since they’d popped the tense bubble between them, Ronan’s presence was companionable. It didn’t feel like Adam was pretending at human things like the flu and being cared for. It felt like Adam just happened to be sick, and Ronan just happened to be a shithead loved one who was there, and those things would have remained true whether the underlying cause was supernatural poison or not.

But Adam reached his physical breaking point. It was, as Ronan had said, a long fucking night. An endless fucking night. And the pain radiating through Adam’s abdomen and chest was like he’d forced himself to do sit-ups until his muscles tore, like he’d drunk battery acid, like he’d peeled apart the fibers of his body with vinegar and salt and rusted pliers. Breathing hurt. He’d lost his voice, somewhere along the way, and had been left with a smoker’s rasp that made his vampire hiss worse. He needed to be done. He needed to be done. He needed to be done.

Ronan held what seemed like the millionth bag out to him. Adam pushed his hand away, shook his head. “I can’t.”

Ronan just eyed him, silent and challenging.

“I can’t,” Adam repeated. “I can’t.”

Ronan held the bag out again, uncompromising. “You gotta.”

Adam was aware of this. It had, after all, been a long fucking night. He’d done a lot of things he didn’t think he could do in the name of survival. He’d dragged his body into working while it was shutting down on him. He’d half-crawled through the basement of the apartment building Declan had given him to hide in. He’d clung to consciousness for so much longer than was reasonably possible, as the darkness closed in, until his brain had whirred its way to full blindness and his heart stopped in his chest and his lungs refused to pull in more air. He’d died tonight, after fighting so fucking hard not to, and then he’d come back, and then he’d been told to keep fighting, and he hadn’t gotten a single chance to rest.

It had to be almost over. It had to be. Adam was aware he had to see the endeavor through if he wanted to maximize his chances of recovery. He was aware there wasn’t a choice in the matter, really. He was aware he needed to endure it. He was even aware that there was nothing physically stopping him from enduring it; the pain was a protest, but until his muscles actually became too damaged to work, it didn’t mean a thing.

Intellectually, he knew all of these things. He also knew he’d hit a wall he could not push past or summit. The wall was a mysterious, indefinable construct. It was not made of rational logic, and it also wasn’t comprised of simple facts, but it was made of truth.

“I _can’t,”_ Adam said, and then he found himself crying like an idiot.

The crying was the wall. A defense mechanism, maybe. After a certain point, one stressful event piled on top of another on top of another on top of another would collapse into an event horizon. The stress and pain and fear had to get out of him somehow, so his body had decided tears were a release valve. Adam couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried. It would have been like trying to stop his heartbeat.

The reaction wasn’t even refined crying. If Adam was going to use tears as an emotional regulator, God knew he’d have preferred to pick the setting and mechanism and duration himself. Turned it into a ritual as clinical and detached as feeding. Crafted it private rather than performance. Instead he was making ugly snotty noises, sobbing with his hands over his face, gasping for air.

This night really was the worst.

He hadn’t cried like this in a long time. Maybe ever. It was an uncontrolled spectacle, a personification of embarrassment. It was every single thing he never wanted to be. And -- no, he had cried like this before. Years ago, years and years. A buried, half-repressed memory, a still-tender bruise that didn’t want to heal.

_“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please--” He’d been seven or eight, blood on his mouth, grasping at his mother’s hand as he begged her to turn around. His mother -- she hadn’t really been, though, not emotionally and almost certainly not biologically. “Please, please, I’m sorry--”_

_“Don’t make a scene,” she’d said, pulling her hand from his, refusing to turn. Denying comfort or touch even as he wept for her. “This was your fault.”_

God, Adam didn’t need that wisp of memory here, at daybreak heralding the end of the longest night of his life. Even as he cried, he was viewing his body as an impartial third party observer. The body, getting rid of all the inconvenient stress chemicals in the bloodstream. The mind, going somewhere else until it was over.

“Okay,” Ronan said, low and rumbling. It was the kind of voice he might use with an injured calf. This, too, Adam experienced in duality. The mind, prodding tiredly at principle and irritation, while the body relaxed like it was in fact an injured calf.

Adam hiccuped, tried to regain control, pulled his hands from his face. Already he was tired of the episode and the explanations he’d need to give, and he hadn’t even formulated those yet.

There was a rustle of fabric, a small clink of metal. When Adam looked at Ronan, he’d pulled off his shirt and jacket and boots and was kicking his pants aside, leaving his underwear. Ronan was beautiful, especially in the deep blue light, but Adam couldn’t make sense of the scene. He gaped at Ronan for about two seconds, surprised out of crying. It occurred to him that Ronan might have gone for “strip tease” as a panic-button solution to the sudden appearance of emotion, but he wasn’t sure that was the most logical answer.

“I’m not coming on to you,” Ronan said, thoroughly impatient, in response to the Look. “So you can't do more blood right now. That’s cool. We’ll take a break.”

And then he stepped into the tub beside Adam. Given that it was one of those whirlpool jet tubs crafted from nonsense and witchery, there was plenty of room for both of them to carve out their own little corners. It was worth noting, though, that the past several hours of hell had made everything _fucking gross._ Adam spared a moment to be horrified, then reminded himself that Ronan thought mucking around in cow shit was a fun way to spend a Saturday, so really he shouldn’t have been surprised.

Ronan was tall enough that he didn’t have to stretch to grab the showerhead. It was an extendable model, attached to a cord long enough to droop to the floor with a snake coil to spare. Ronan turned the water on, aiming the spray away from Adam, his other hand testing the temperature.

“You’re insane,” Adam said. Really, rinsing off was the least insane idea anyone had had all night, but the context was throwing him for a loop. Ronan Lynch, watching him break down for the first time basically ever, throwing caution to the winds and saying _bathtime_ as a solution. Adam hadn't expected it, which was stupid, because it was also completely on brand.

“We’re gonna have to clean up at some point,” Ronan pointed out. On the surface, this was logical, until you also pointed out that Adam wasn’t done being sick yet, and cleaning a surface that was about to get dirty again was simple inefficiency. “Is this cool?”

Adam knew that Ronan knew this was inefficient. He knew that Ronan was being kind, and being kinder by pretending there was a logical root so Adam didn't have to look like he was accepting untempered kindness.

Adam shrugged one shoulder. “Wash your feet, at least. Nasty.”

He was prepared for Ronan to turn an icy blast on him -- this, at least, seemed like typical Ronan behavior, manic assholery to distract people from sadness -- but Ronan just let the spray drizzle near Adam’s leg and said, “Touch that and tell me if it’s too hot. Fuck if I know what’s scalding to you creepy fucks.”

Adam obliged, and only discovered his fingers had been freezing when they were met with the relief of warmth. “It’s good.”

Ronan had the decency to spritz the nastiness in the tub down the drain, possibly more for Adam’s sake than his own. “Hold this,” he said, handing Adam the showerhead.

Adam just let it lay in his lap, spitting warm water halfheartedly over his thighs. “I don’t know what your game is,” he said.

“It’s a game called I’m a fucking genius who’s brilliant and intuitive and full of forethought.” Ronan leaned over Adam and picked up the Horror Satchel. From three of the outside pockets he pulled several washcloths, two bars of soap, and what looked like shampoo and conditioner.

“You don’t have hair,” Adam said suspiciously. “Are these Declan’s?”

“Sargent’s. They were in one of the bathrooms downstairs.”

Oh. Much better than Declan. Adam was definitely not opposed to using things scented like Blue, especially now, when his sense of smell was so shaky.

It occurred to Adam that Ronan had anticipated that he’d need a bath, because of fucking course he’d need a bath, and that Ronan had anticipated he might be too weak to move, and maybe that Ronan had anticipated that he’d be too weak to clean himself off, which might have been why Ronan had picked the largest tub in the Barns. Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about that. After mulling it over for a moment, he decided none of the discomfort was Ronan’s fault. It was rooted in his anxiety about the weakness, all the factors outside his control.

Ronan sat down beside him with his prizes in hand, then dumped them unceremoniously in Adam’s lap and picked up the showerhead. Once again, Adam braced himself for a faceful of spray, but instead it was... not awful.

It was kind of wonderful, actually. Ronan gently rinsing away the blood and the gore, leaning close enough for his arm to press against Adam’s hand or collarbone or chest. The weight of him reminded Adam of the aching in his muscles, but once again it was warm, and quiet, and -- _good._

Ronan followed the rinsing by lathering soap against a washcloth. Adam tensed, bracing himself for abrasion or fear or righteous indignation, but Ronan didn’t approach the task how he expected. Rather than keeping their bodies separate, Ronan wrapped both his arms around Adam and slung a leg carelessly over his, entangling them like a two-headed eldritch entity. From there, when he brushed the cloth over Adam’s shoulder and the side of his neck and his jaw, it was an extension of the embrace. Something tender and sensual and yearning. It was Ronan, wrapped around him, being soft and careful and balanced, rather than Ronan assuming a position of power.

There was something about the cleansing feel of soap over the soft texture of cotton that made Adam’s muscles unwind. He hadn’t realized exactly how much tension he’d been carrying until his body began to let it go. Somewhere in the limb tangling endeavor, his mouth had ended up near the shell of Ronan’s ear. He murmured, “I can wash myself. I’m not helpless.”

“If you honestly think this is about being _helpless_ then you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought, which is saying something, given that you’re a _gigantic fucking idiot.”_ Ronan punctuated this by nudging the cloth against the hollow behind Adam’s earlobe, which did something to Adam’s insides that made him sag bonelessly against Ronan's shoulder.

“God,” Adam said. “What are we doing?”

“Taking a break.”

And for the next few minutes, that was all it needed to be. Discussions and definitions and negotiations could wait for later. Taking a break was what this was now, because Adam desperately needed it, and maybe Ronan kind of needed it too. The way Ronan was touching him, Adam thought as he drifted into a half-doze of contentment, bore the reverent exploratory impressions of someone who’d wanted to do so for a long time.

He was still exhausted, when the itch for blood hit him again and signaled the tragic end of break time. He was still in so much pain he could barely move. He still didn’t want to do this.

But he’d relaxed further than he expected to, and he felt like he could face the awfulness now. 

Alone, he wouldn’t have stood a fucking chance.

\---

It turned out Adam _was_ close to the end of the sickness. It wouldn’t have been possible to remove all the silver from his system, and the trace amounts remaining were liable to keep fucking with his body for... he wasn’t sure how long. There weren’t a lot of reliable stories of vampires who’d survived silver poisoning. He made a note to ask the women of Fox Way. If anyone knew, they would.

When he’d finally managed the miracle of keeping down a meal, Ronan helped him clean up again and towel off and pull on too-large spare pajamas and head to Ronan’s bedroom. Sleeping on his bed would be different, this time, the same way sleeping on Blue’s bed in Fox Way was different, or sleeping on Gansey’s bed in Monmouth was different. Adam didn’t have the energy to overthink it, so he gratefully accepted the pillow and blanket sanctuary instead.

“Before you sleep, Parrish,” Ronan said, and Adam cracked one eye open, “tell me if you want Gansey and Blue here tomorrow. I’m guessing you’re gonna pass the fuck out for a while. I won’t call them if you don’t want me to. But I think they’d want to know.”

Adam didn’t have to take much time to consider. “I want them here.”

Because he did. He wanted Ronan here, and he wanted Gansey here, and he wanted Blue here. His family, his partners. Commitment. Learning each of the three of them had been such a slow journey of becoming less solitary himself. And now here Adam was, sick and recovering and wanting to be surrounded by people, where a few years ago he’d have crawled into a hole to avoid the horror of being seen.

Which meant that he woke up with Gansey pressed tightly against his back, arms locked around his waist like Adam was a fever dream he was desperately clinging to. Which meant that he woke up with Blue’s hand in his hair and her bright eyes on his and her soft breath of, _"Adam Parrish,_ you’re not allowed to die, not ever,” and the taste of her kiss on his mouth. Which meant that he woke up with Ronan’s hand and foot vaguely situated atop his body where they’d landed after Ronan had slung his limbs across Gansey on Gansey’s other side. The four of them absolutely could not fit in the bed. Adam and Gansey, in the middle, were in no danger of falling. Ronan and Blue, on the edges, were basically floating via sheer determination. Adam could picture, then, the desperate anxiety Gansey must have been exuding, the fear in Blue after learning she’d nearly lost him. How Gansey and Blue had crowded in around his sleeping body, how Ronan had pressed himself against Gansey's spine so he'd stop shaking.

Adam's senses were still uncalibrated. His thoughts remained a little slow, and when he lifted his hand to pet Blue’s hair, a tremor still ran through his fingers. But for once, the fear didn't choke him. Whatever the long-term effects of the poison were, he was here, and he was alive, and he was loved, and he loved the three of them so _fucking_ much, and he'd get to keep loving them for as long as he wanted, because he was _alive_. God. God, he'd never been so happy to be alive.

It was gonna be okay.


End file.
